How to design a great participant experience in the new virtual world
APX and Facebook are currently running a global, fully digital 12-week unique acceleration program for growth-stage, digital startups. These are my learnings from managing the program.
This month, we at APX launched the second season of the Facebook Accelerator Berlin in partnership with APX, a global acceleration program. This is a four-month program focused on specific functional areas of the leadership team of the company: Management, Marketing, Product and Tech. The program aims for growth-stage startups with product in market, traction, and strong signals of product-market-fit, from all over Europe.
Obviously, months of planning had gone into designing and organizing the program, which was meant to have lots of in-person interaction and meetings — but the outbreak of COVID-19 meant we had to completely redesign the concept last minute and adapt to the new situation.
Personally, I’m a huge believer in human interactions and a big fan of communities. Going completely digital with a program that is very much based on the sparks created when 27 people who don’t know each other yet meet and create meaningful interaction, was quite challenging. I am sure that many of you are facing similar challenges, so I’d like to share my best practices and most important learnings from the first weeks of running a fully virtual program with speakers and participants from all over the world — from Germany to New Zealand:
1. Don’t start at the beginning
Usually, at conferences, we have chitchats over our first or second coffee, we introduce ourselves, talk to one another, and already notice a few people that we wish to talk to later. Now, how do we translate this important interaction into a virtual event?
“Our aim is to create a semi-personal/professional atmosphere to allow the participants to get to know each other better on a personal level.”
What worked really well for us was to invite the participants to join 20 minutes before the first speaker is “on stage” to have time for the participants to connect and feel more comfortable with each other. Our aim is to create a semi-personal/professional atmosphere to allow the participants to get to know each other better on a personal level. Our first digital session started with the questions about the participant’s morning routine which led to a discussion about their best productivity tips and recommended podcasts.
2. Set the stage and practice in advance
Virtual sessions follow a different logic. Firstly, in virtual sessions, the moderator plays a different but still significant role in the success of a program: From facilitating the group’s dynamic, to introducing the speakers, keeping track of time and asking questions for a productive discussion. Start with information about the speaker (always nice to add something personal), what we are going to learn today, the agenda of the session, the most important points of this session, and how to interact with the speaker: f.e. by writing questions on the chat during the session or asking at the end of the session. It’s important to set the stage before the session starts.
Secondly, the speakers need to adapt to the fact that they cannot feel the audience and make sure their messages are delivered properly. Sessions in the virtual world need to be practiced in advance. In our program, we did a trial session with each speaker and it made a huge difference! Plus: it’s also a great opportunity for you to test the platform and make sure all technical aspects run smoothly.
Also, try to add more slides to the presentations to keep it flowing and dynamic. For more tips on presenting digitally, read this post by my colleague Tilman Kemper about remote pitching.
3. Test, fail, learn, repeat
I can’t emphasize this enough: make sure you are providing a real, focused, and clear value proposition. Test your market, run a feedback survey before and after the sessions, and ask your peers and colleagues for feedback. We are swimming in an endless ocean of information, especially at the moment, and sometimes we need to stop and ask ourselves: who really needs it?
The main learning from our own survey was that the audience wanted more “hands-on” experiences and real-life use case discussions. Therefore, we decided to add bi/weekly sessions focused on topics around management, marketing, product and tech. Those ‘spotlight sessions’ are shorter and aim to facilitate smaller professional discussions based on other companies’ use case studies and best practices.
“We are swimming in an endless ocean of information and sometimes we need to stop and ask ourselves: who really needs it?”
4. Build a community around your product
You can build an amazing program with top-notch speakers, but if you don’t make sure to have constant communication with the participants, they won’t remember you. The speakers and the agenda are only aspects of your product — not the main goal. Make sure the participants have a platform where they can “meet” each other and discuss their current challenges or share their tips. We are using Clique.ai, but there are several tools out there, so make sure you find one that really works for you. Our spotlight sessions are also a good way to stay connected and keep participants engaged. There are so many ways — find out what your participants need and want and be creative!
5. Remember the time, time-off and time-zones
Make sure to have enough breaks in between sessions. As our program covers full days, we made sure to have a five-minute break between sessions and at least one hour break for lunch, emails, etc.
As the moderator, you might have to be the “bad cop” sometimes, and stop the current speaker from going beyond their time frame. It’s important to leave enough time for questions, so limit your speaker to a specific time frame and save some extra minutes for questions. For a full-day program, I would recommend keeping the time per session at one hour maximum.
A bonus tip: Be aware of time zones. Since our location is not relevant anymore in the virtual space, it’s easy to forget that it’s not 9 am everywhere at the same time. Don’t make the same mistake as we did when we wanted to invite a speaker from the U.S. and only realized after the agenda was finalized that we can’t ask anyone to join at 6 a.m. local time…
6. Open discussions > closed questions
One of the most important things when planning a program is to focus on knowledge-sharing among the participants. In order to encourage a more in-depth discussion and not just a Q&A ping-pong, try to divide the crowd into smaller groups (you can f.e. use Zoom breakout rooms) to have fruitful discussions and thorough engagement between the participants. At our program, we divided the participants into smaller groups based on their position within their companies (management, marketing, product and tech), so they could also share best practices, professional challenges and get to know each other better.
Lastly, try to make the participants’ experience a bit more personal. Ask the speakers to share their personal experiences and challenges, and encourage the participants to share their daily challenges or best practices. This will connect the whole group.
I do believe that what we created is already providing value equivalent to what an offline program would, and it helps our founders in the curvy road known as entrepreneurial life. If you have any questions, feedback or valuable tools we should know of, feel free to contact me at mor@apx.ac.
Good luck with your digital program!
